A blog post to vaporize my last remaining brain cell

It's 6:20pm in Reykjavik: pyjama time.

We're all telling each other we aren't going to bed yet while we get suspiciously, dangerously under the covers. But it's ok if we fall asleep. It's a miracle, and a testament to the girls' fortitude, that we're still awake at this hour.

We left Halifax at 3:20pm local time, spent 4:30pm-8:30pm bumming around Pearson Airport waiting for our connection, and then flew the ~5 hours from Toronto to Reykjavik, landing in Iceland around 6am local time; if you're keeping track, you know this felt like 3am to bodies that started the day in Halifax. The girls got a little bit of sleep on the plane--2 hours, maximum, and even that was uncomfortable and broken up by the airplane's many interruptions. Brian and I got no sleep at all. Needless to say, by the time we arrived in downtown Reykjavik via the $170 bus ride (gasp) and found that our hotel room wasn't ready (an understandable situation 8 hours before our scheduled check-in time), we were all exhausted. Seeing it on our faces, and witnessing us struggle with basic cognition, the woman at the reception desk led us to the breakfast room--stopping just short of holding my hand--and told her colleagues we were to be given a free breakfast. This thrilled the kids and caffeinated the parents, and we decided to pass the morning at Sundhöll Reykjavikur, the public pool and sauna we fell in love with on our previous visit to Iceland. 

The facility has several pools of different temperatures--most of them outdoors--as well as a sauna and steam room. It costs around $15 CAD per adult, and the kids were free; you can rent towels for around $8 CAD each. There is a very shallow, hot pool where a person in a jet lagged state risks falling asleep and drowning--not the worst way to go, really--a deeper hot tub, a cold plunge, a lap pool, and two "hot pots", one of which was too hot even for me (43 celsius). In Iceland, pool users shower naked (communally) before entering the pool--none of this 'rinsing off in your bathing suit' malarky--and we bravely obliged, shedding the insecurities and discomfort we've all accrued in a culture that doesn't get publicly naked often. It was a good lesson in cultural relativism for the kids, and I appreciated not having to make anybody a personal changeroom out of a bathtowel and my arms.

After a couple hours of poaching, we were cooked. We went back to the hotel to find that our room was ready and, elated, went to it to have an epic nap: the first sleep in about 28 hours for the adults, and the first horizontal sleep in 28 hours for the kids. The hotel room, by the way, is awesome. It's really an apartment, and it has a quirky polished stone bathroom, a cute view, and comfy beds.

We forced ourselves up out of said beds after two hours and set out in search of lunch ($60 CAD worth of sub sandwiches), the playground Brian and I remembered from last time, and a grocery store to buy supplies for a simple dinner (another $50, but there are leftovers). The playground has leather 5' trampolines embedded in the ground and a zipline that adults and children can both use, among other playground structures. We made good use of all of it and eventually pried the kids away to go look inside the Hallgrimskirkja.

I don't know how the kids did it, but they kept up; actually, they led us from place to place. They love Iceland. Lucy keeps saying "I need to come back here." Alice is non-stop chattering about how cool and different everything is. I joked that Lucy was like mini-Grampy, always confidently several paces ahead. Alice could have kept shopping, and Lucy would have stopped at every playground or parkour opportunity in the city if we'd let her. In the end it was Brian and I who ran out of steam and urged our party home to eat our bread, cheese, salami, tomatoes, cucumber and hummus. Godwilling, we'll sleep from 8pm 7:30pm to 6:30am, waking just in time to hit the hotel's complimentary breakfast buffet before heading out in a rental car to explore the Golden Circle.